Data Visualization: Creating Geo-spatial dashboards in Qlikview

In my previous article, we discussed how to use Qlikview for visualization of tabular information. Now, let’s think of a scenario, where we need to represent location wise sales for a company running operations in India.

We can represent this information in many ways – tabular format, graphical representation or representation on geographical maps. Let’s have a look at each of these representations and see why should we represent information on Geo-Map?

A few key benefits of using geo-spatial visualization are:

We can easily understand the distribution of Organizations presence across the country.

Easy to represent high number of locations compare to tabular or graphical representation

More intuitive decision making for the business owner.

Due to these benefits, there has been a marked increase in geo-spatial visualizations. Almost all BI tools have started offering this visualization as a standard option (e.g. Qlikview, Tableau, SAS Visual Analytics etc.).

When I started using Qlikview a years back, I wanted this visualization to be part of the dashboards I prepare, but i was unable to find a nicely structured tutorial around it. Hence I thought to contribute this article for the benefit of other analysts like me, who are struggling with similar question.

Steps to represent information on Google Map:

Load base data (with Latitude and Longitude of location).

Generate Google Map Variables

Create a Scatter plot and configure Google Map

Loading the base data with the Latitude and Longitude of Location:

Following is the excel file used for this tutorial. Load this in Qlikview:

Qlikview Google Map Base Data

Make sure that Latitude and Longitude variable names are in lower case, as google map variable gets generated based on lower case only.

Generate Google map variables:

Create another tab in script (File -> Edit Script. Then in new window Tab .> Add New). The paste the following code to generate Google Map variable.

In Caption tab, width and height according to map_size_x and map_size_y (defined in the script).

Finally, we get the desired results:

This is an example where we represent information on geographical map in Qlikview. Have you done something similar in past? Do you have any experience / case studies illustrating the same in Qlikview or other visualization tools.

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